99.9% of gun owners aren’t radical either!

President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims reject radical Islam. He made the comments in response to a question about the White House avoiding using the phrase “Islamic terrorists.”

“You know, I think that the way to understand this is there is an element growing out of Muslim communities in certain parts of the world that have perverted the religion, have embraced a nihilistic, violent, almost medieval interpretation of Islam, and they’re doing damage in a lot of countries around the world,” said Obama.

“But it is absolutely true that I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognize it as being Islam, and I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it’s very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking for–order, peace, prosperity.”

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that 99.9% of the ~3.3 million Muslims living in the United States reject radical Islam (although though we all know that isn’t true in). With that said, wouldn’t it also be fair to say that 99.9% of Evil Black Rifle (EBR) owners reject indiscriminately murdering people as well? If we going to protect the constitutional rights of Muslims regardless of the deadly actions of a select few, shouldn’t we also protect the constitutional rights of EBR owners despite the actions of even fewer EBR owners? Mustn’t we then conclude that the onerous and ineffective restrictions proposed by the gun control crowd, always trying to utilize the fresh memory of dead bodies to peddle their agenda, would be just as unfair to EBR owners as, for example, a Muslim immigration ban would be to Muslims?

You will notice that I say “EBR” instead of “assault rifle” because these weapons aren’t assault rifles at all. They are semi-automatic rifles with no capacity for fully-automatic fire, which is primarily used by soldiers to lay down suppressive fire, and for engaging multiple targets at short range. If you’ve ever fired a fully-automatic weapon, you know why it’s commonly referred to as “spray and pray”.

Just to be clear, when the government buys the fully-automatic M4 for use here in the USA, for the Smithsonian and the US Mint, among others, it is a “personal defense weapon”; clearly they need to lay down suppressive fire and engage multiple civilians at once in the name of “personal defense”. But when a civilian buys the semi-automatic AR-15, it is an “assault rifle” and needs to be banned. You can’t make this stuff up.

It would be very difficult to accurately analyze who does and doesn’t have access to legally owned EBRs, so for simplicity’s sake, we’ll use a low estimate of 20 million people with access. That’s six times the number of Muslims in the USA. Don’t EBR owners deserve to not be labeled as fanatics and murderers just like Muslims? Don’t EBR owners deserve to retain their constitutional rights also? Especially given that there are six times as many EBR owners as Muslims in the United States.

The NRA only has 5 million members, so there are plenty of EBR owners (myself included) who are not members of the NRA, but will still likely be plenty pissed off if their Second Amendment rights are trampled. And there are at least 110 million people who live in a household with at least one gun, so pitching useless gun control measures such as hi-capacity magazine bans is sure to piss off even more people.

At this point it is worth mentioning the fact that rifles of all types account for ~4% of all firearm homicides annually – if you accounted solely for EBRs, the number would certainly be lower. You are almost twice as likely to be killed with a blunt object, and about five times as likely to be killed with a knife or other cutting instrument as an EBR. Even if you include all rifle deaths for 20 years (~7,000), over 99.99% of EBR owners in the USA still reject murder. Still, gun control advocates insist on calling EBR owners murderers with blood on their hands, while still refusing to recognize that radical Islam had a much bigger role in driving Omar Mateen to kill. Gun grabbers are always consistent in their shameless hypocrisy.

When gun control advocates don’t get their way, of course they throw a big temper tantrum and disrupt the entire lawmaking process. Even worse, the liberal rags will cheer them on, even though they voted down other proposals put forward by Republicans that were almost as intrusive on gun rights as their own. How’s this – let’s note every member who participated in the sit-in, and force them to vote on an “assault weapons ban”. I can guarantee the ones in gun-friendly districts will be squirming on that floor they’re “sitting-in” on. They would be forced to choose between voting against an assault weapons ban and looking like a total hypocrite in the process, or voting for an assault weapons ban, and losing their up-coming election. Can someone please make this happen?

There is a simple reason for this – the gun control crowd is trying to take away a constitutional right, and to take away something already enjoyed by millions of Americans. Those who have that right and want to keep it, are clearly prepared to fight and vote on this issue more than those who want to restrict it. We are all single issue voters – we don’t care if the candidate is Republican, Democrat, Green Party, whatever – we won’t even consider voting for them if they are on the wrong side of gun rights. Honestly, I think Bloomberg might be a good President, but I would actively campaign against him if he were running, just because of how much he spends in attempts to restrict the rights of legal gun owners across the USA.

The gun control crowd is largely a bunch of SJW types who hear about bad things and injustices and look for instant, quick fix solutions. They are the types who frequently say things like “Ban all guns!” or call for an “assault weapons ban”. And some of them may actually be single issue voters, but they will vote for “clean energy” one year, and vote to kill it the next year when their electric bill goes up 200% and they are subjected to rolling blackouts.

And the gun rights crowd?

We always vote for gun rights!

There are tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of us. We go to the polls, this year as we do every year, to vote for gun rights. We are a far bigger group than Muslims, and we deserve the same respect that they do. When you try to restrict our rights by instituting foolish gun control measures like an “assault weapons ban”, we will be there to vote against you. And we will never forget how you cast your vote; in this election, and every election to come.

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Duane Norman is a thirty-something, straight, white male living in the northeastern US, and is a staunch advocate of free markets and legal gun ownership. Duane founded Free Market Shooter and occasionally contributes to Single Dude Travel on issues related to freedom, liberty and the basic human right to self-defense.